Browsed byTag: editing

Yikes. I’d just got back on the blogging wagon, and then I fell off it again. I’m sorry for my extended silence. I haven’t been doing brilliantly the last few weeks — I’ve had some bad pain flare-ups, along with the migraines I’ve been suffering for the last couple of months, and am barely finding time to do anything. Where I do have any time, I’m tending to use it to work on Bard, which means I’ve been reading very…

It’s been a while since I did a more newsie-type blog post — I’ve been all about the Thinking(TM) recently. But I figured I’d keep you all updated on a couple of things that are going on right now. Firstly, I’m rewriting Bard. For those who aren’t aware, Bard is an Arthurian-inspiried SF novel I wrote in early 2016, posting the first draft chapter-by-chapter on Wattpad. It’s set on a distant planet that was one of Earth’s prison colonies, until…

How are you going to stop yourself obsessively refreshing your inbox every day after the Pitch Wars submission window closes? No, obsessing over your Instagram stats isn’t a good answer; that wouldn’t stop you. So what else are you going to do? Oh, you’re going to write something new? That sounds like a good idea. If you get picked for Pitch Wars, you’ll just be revising Butterfly of Night for the rest of the year. It might be nice to…

Working three days a week means that technically speaking, I have more days off work than days at work. Despite this, I still feel an enormous sense of pressure to get things done on those days off — to hit writing targets, take photos for instagram, write blog posts, run errands, do dance practice… All the things I don’t have the time or energy to do on work days. This is not inherently a problem. I’m pretty sure this kind…

I’m currently line-editing Butterfly of Night, a novel about a screwed-up teenage assassin and her poor life choices. In June and July, I did a major plot rewrite with some big changes, and this month I’m rewriting the whole thing again for style, continuity, and because it’s too long and I need to cut as many words as possible. (I’ve cut 2411 words so far. I’m aiming for 5k overall, but I’m not sure how I’m going to get there.)…

I don’t seem to have the hang of the whole blogging malarkey at the moment. Sorry about that. Hoping to do a more detailed write-up of my trip to Ireland for the Blas International Summer School for Music and Dance, but my hands are… not doing too great at the moment, and I’m trying to save them as much as I can. Therefore this post will be a few brief bits of news, hopefully with some longer ones to come….

The general feeling in the comments of my last post (and from people I talked to separately) was that I should delay querying until I’ve done these edits. And the general feeling in my brain is that no matter how much I want to do them now, I have to wait until after my exams. My dissertation is due in barely more than a month, and my exams start in approximately ten weeks. I’m already doing a dance competition the…

A few weeks ago, I said that I was querying. That I’d finally overcome my perfectionism and constant editing to send out six entire queries, and was planning to send more. So here’s an update. First off, I’ve had three replies, and they’ve all been rejections. I wasn’t too disappointed by the first two as they weren’t agents I was particularly invested in, but the third one was one I’d been hopeful about, so I was a little bit sad…

So, I promised myself earlier this week that I would send out at least two queries by the end of the week. It’s now Saturday evening, and I’ve not only kept that promise, but exceeded it — I’ve sent out six. (I’ve also found several more jobs to apply for and started filling in various application forms, so I am adulting hard right now. Are you in awe yet? Because you should be in awe.) This is despite the fact…

NaNoWriMo has been a part of my life since I was thirteen. In 2009, somebody on the writing website Protagonize.com was talking about National Novel Writing Month and, being a keen/obsessive writer at the time, I decided to sign up, although it was already the seventh of November and I had no plot, characters, or experience of writing a novel. Nevertheless, I succeeded at the 50,000 word challenge, and finished my first (terrible, short, cliched) novel. I’ve done NaNo every…